Vienna nicest city to live in, Zagreb ranks 98th

The Austrian capital of Vienna again won the title as the highest ranked city in the Quality of Living Survey conducted by Mercer, the New York-headquartered human resources consulting firm, while the Croatian capital of Zagreb ranks 98th on a list of 230 cities.

“The survey of 230 cities helps companies and organisations determine compensation and hardship allowances for international staff. It uses dozens of criteria such as political stability, health care, education, crime, recreation and transport. Global centres London, Paris, Tokyo and New York City did not even make the top 30, lagging behind most big German, Scandinavian and Australian cities,” Reuters said.

Vienna has been at the top of the ranking for seven consecutive years.

“Vienna’s 1.7 million inhabitants benefit from the city’s cafe culture and museums, theatres and operas. Rents and public transport costs in the city whose architecture is marked by its past as the centre of the Habsburg empire are cheap compared with other western capitals,” according to Reuters.

Zurich in Switzerland, Auckland in New Zealand, Munich in Germany and Vancouver in Canada followed Vienna in the top five most pleasant cities to live in.

Zagreb fares better than, for example, Tel Aviv, Wroclaw or Shanghai.

Some of the cities in Croatia’s neighbourhood score better than Croatia’s capital – Ljubljana ranking 76th and Budapest 77th.

On the other hand, Belgrade is behind Zagreb, ranking 141st, and Sarajevo 158th.

Baghdad was again ranked lowest in the world. Damascus, five year’s into Syria’s bloody war, ranked six places above Baghdad, with Bangui in the Central African Republic, war-torn Yemen’s capital Sanaa, Haiti’s Port-au-Prince, Sudan’s Khartoum and Chad’s N’Djamena in between.